Swedish Pirate Party leader quits due to boredom

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The founder and chairman of the Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge, has quit after five years heading up the anti-copyright political vehicle, citing boredom as one of the reasons he decided to step down.

“There’s nothing left for me to learn. Everything ahead would be subtle variations of things I had already done,” he said in a blog post on 2 January.

“While one can say that this makes me professionally qualified to continue doing the same things, it also makes me bored doing the same things. When I’m not learning, I’m not living.”

Falkvinge said he was no longer having fun running the Swedish arm of the Pirate Party, which failed to secure a parliamentary seat in the country's general election last September, after it pulled in less than 1.4 per cent of the national vote.

“It was about a year ago I realised I was slowly beginning to stagnate, and while we’re far from fully there yet, I don’t want to go fully there, either,” admitted the party’s founder.

He will stay working as a “political evangelist” of the party mainly covering “keynote invitations” in Europe.

Falkvinge’s deputy, Anna Troberg, has taken over as the Pirate Party’s leader. ®